Lee Rotherham

October 29, 2010

Yesterday’s European Council, on good sources, has endorsed something very close to the original text put forward by the working group on economic governance. We explored back on Monday some of the key problems in that document, ConservativeHome beating the newspapers on this occasion by a good 48 hours. It is now plain that a number of the evident issues of concern (including the weird precedent of ‘reversed QMV’) are clearly still in the end agreement.

Let’s put the events of the last two days into some form of context. The Council is looking at handing back to the UK a sum maybe, perhaps, in the order of £400 million. After the embarrassing confusion both from former Europe spokesman Ed Davey and former EU minister Chris Bryant last night on Question Time on how much the sum came to, we can allow ourselves the luxury here of a little ball park latitude.

That, of course, is not a rebate. Given the nature of the budget, it is effectively a one-off payment. It is, moreover, a one-off repayment of part of a surcharge.

Imagine you rented a house or flat where the rent kept going up, year after year. But your landlord was the worst sort. He never mowed the front lawn. The ornamental pond had lots of dead fish floating around in it. You had no locks on the doors and your co-tenants with impunity raided your fridge and your tool collection and never brought anything back. Then one day you came back from work to find that he’d gone into your flat and taken £100 out of your wallet to increase the rent. Getting £50 back would not, I suggest, be a triumph, nor for that matter a permanent solution to your housing issues.

£400 million of British taxpayer money returned is equally not a solution.

We have a Commission prepared to spend millions on open propaganda material (hat tip: the sterling England Expects blog). We have the Court of Auditors acknowledging (see box 10) delays in cutting red tape over EU legal obligations for businesses, that the Commission costed five years ago at an incredible €123.8 billion, and of which at least a quarter has already been deemed excessive by Brussels itself. We have even gotten ourselves into the predicament that sovereignty has so flown from Westminster that ministers have to ask the Commission for permission to allow horses into the country in preparation for the equestrian events in the Olympic Games.

At least the recently-published ban on the use of alcohol in competition ten pin bowling was still just about within British ministerial remit.

This is so much Groundhog Day. Nine years ago, the heads of government set out a list of measures that should be explored to make a democratic EU work. The Laeken Declaration was a massive missed opportunity, the EU’s last chance for systemic reform, and only properly explored by the remarkable work undertaken by David Heathcoat-Amory during the European Convention.

We live now in an age of QMV, indeed now of new topsy-turvy reverse QMV. Opportunities for Britain to force reform will be increasingly rare, which is of course why we ended up with the budget increase mess in the first place. If Laeken is to be finally dumped, if the last chance to implement reforms is to be cast aside, if no powers are ever to be repatriated, then patently we now live in an unvarnished new reality. If there exists neither the prospect nor the will for reform, there remains no other alternative than for this country to leave the European Union.

October 25, 2010

It came out late on Friday, so most journalists would have missed it. Van Rompuy has transmitted to heads of government the results of the Task Force on economic governance. This was, you may remember, the result of ministers kicking certain controversies into the long grass in the summer.

The grass has now been mown. In particular, we can observe how there is a clear call for an increased use of “sanctions” to control government recklessness. We note with particular concern “These sanctions will be first applied to euro area Member States only” (my emphasis), and take the form of an interest-bearing fine. Given the existing net British contribution to the EU budget, and the prospect of voting rights also being suspended, I’m not entirely convinced the co-opted buzzword “progressive” quite fits the bill.

It also, crucially, appears that the Commission seems to believe that enough authority already exists for such sanctions to be applied under the current terms of the treaty, a stance which although highly dubious (even were one to consider the use of the “rubber articles”) is only to be expected given the 'minor democratic difficulties' that seem to accompany treaty change.

There is also this bold assertion, as has already been flagged up by Dan Hannan: “For the new sanctions that will be adopted in secondary legislation, we will move towards qualified reverse majority vote.” This means the Commission gets its way unless a blocking majority votes against it – the threshold for the majority vote is thus reversed, and, moreover, a deadline is attached to make it that little bit harder.

We are informed that “There have been some misunderstandings about this issue.” Quite so. Since the treaties don’t provide for it, this looks exactly like the sort of legerdemain that integrationists were involved with at the time of the Convention on the Future of Europe, where there was an attempt by the drafters to allow the treaty to be ratifiable without all the member states ratifying it.

It is as if the Commission has been spotted strolling into the storeroom in Rome where the EU treaties are held, carrying a rubber-tipped pencil.

Meanwhile, as a pointer to how the EU is developing a perverse form of subsidiarity in ever-closer union, this paragraph proves quite instructive;

In order to further reinforce national ownership of the recommendations issued under the "European semester", governments, when submitting the draft budget to the national parliament are expected to include policy recommendations by the Council and / or the Commission accompanied by an explanation of how these have been incorporated.

Let’s take a step back. What this all signifies is that we shall soon be able to judge the mettle of the Treasury – all the more easily if it publically releases its submission to the Task Force, dated 9 July.

Hopefully, ministers will stand up to this prestidigitation. If they do so, they have an opportunity to strengthen their negotiating hand elsewhere. Even better, they have a heaven-sent opportunity to renegotiate powers back to the UK.

Some of the suggestions on ConHome of late as to what should come back have been ambitious, but given the realities of the current coalition I think the proposals are meaningless because they are unachievable. It is not that they are undesirable, but that the terms of this debate and latent reticence in the FCO limit our reach even if not our horizons. I have suggested repatriation of Fisheries as an achievable quid pro quo that some Lib Dems might agree with as the price for our agreeing a deal on the Eurozone, providing that non-Eurozone countries are unambiguously and permanently kept out of the equation.

Others will have different, very possibly bigger ambitions. But the real argument is not over the price tag; first we have to wake up Treasury and Foreign Office ministers to the real dangers and equally real opportunities now before them. Carpe diem!

October 20, 2010

Tim Montgomerie has an eminently sensible piece today on British policy towards a projected new treaty, following on from one from ‘Melanchthon’ yesterday. In essence, both argue that the difficulties in the Eurozone provide an opportunity for British diplomats.

I fully agree. One of the more astonishing positions of British diplomacy that has developed alongside the principle of opt-outs and go-ahead groups is an unfathomable generosity of spirit towards those pushing for further measures of union.

This altruism most certainly is not shared by our partners. Take just one example, that of fisheries. The CFP essentially came into being as a mechanism for the pre-1973 Atlantic EEC states to gain access to the rich fishing grounds of accession countries, rather than as an original 1950s Treaty of Rome concept of good governance. Come later accession negotiations with new members, Spain threatened to block the big wave of Eastern enlargement unless it got accelerated access to the Irish Box; while France and Spain separately and quite seriously threatened to derail the Austrian round of accessions unless they got a privileged position in Norway’s territorial waters.

The point is that these countries put self-interest ahead of communal interest. They put their fishing constituencies ahead of any sense of the communautaire.

If the Eurozone countries are now in a pickle, and need British acquiescence to change the terms of the party, then London has a precedent. Bring back national control of the UK’s fisheries and scrap the CFP as our price for agreeing. Most of the Eurozone countries won’t care as they don’t fish in the North Sea. Ecologists will love it, as it ends tens of thousands of tonnes of fish being dumped dead back into the sea every year in the greatest ecological scandal of our time. The financial and social arguments are indisputable and have been explored and explained in depth. It even used to the Conservative Party policy for a while, thanks to several excellent fisheries spokesmen in the Commons and to some remarkable work undertaken by Owen Paterson – who is now eminently positioned on behalf of Ulster’s fishermen to revisit the subject and take the project further. Many of the Lib Dems, with their South Western, Scottish and Orkneys ports, have constituencies that would directly benefit and fishing communities that over time would regenerate.

With QMV increasingly as the norm, this is a rare chance to push EU integration into an ebb tide. But if it’s not taken, we establish a truth that withdrawal from the EU is the only alternative possible to ever-closer union.

October 15, 2010

How refreshingly honest. A lot more to the point than an MEPs’ sunshine “study break”. A spade is a spade and a jolly is a jolly, unless they were thinking of Santa Claus and arctic elven contentedness.

Before the anti-corruption campaigners get righteous, fair enough, it’s a worthy cause in general terms – though I’m not entirely convinced that public money is necessarily being properly spent if it is going on supporting a huge blue envelope walking around a town, and a street basketball match between a “Corruption” and the “Anticorruption” teams. We all know who’s going to win that match. Unless it’s just a ruse to get the criminals to turn up and arrest them.

But now the New Labour lexicology has seemingly been binned, I wonder in a British context what other expressions a more plainspeaking Whitehall phrasebook might contain?

October 08, 2010

European integration accelerates in times of crisis. After 9/11, a pile of proposals were lifted from Commission bins to form the basis for a rush of Justice and Home Affairs legislation. Hungary’s toxic sludge disaster will similarly and equally inevitably add impetus to otherwise unconnected measures on pan-Danubism. From a UK perspective, however, one of the more imminent pressures in 2011 will now be on EU Defence cooperation.

One of the criticisms raised against the Spending Review in the MoD has been that it has been based on a fait accompli, and that there hasn’t been more of a basic debate on what the country’s Defence focus is about.

That perception is somewhat unfair. But in any event, in a new paper for the TaxPayers’ Alliance, at least one aspect gets publically explored. It’s intended as an accompaniment to our definitive paper on the development of the EU’s diplomatic corps – the other half of the CFSP equation – and both carry forewords by senior career personnel who know their craft well. In our new analysis, we detail how the conflict between Brussels and Mons has developed over the last fifty years, and in particular the wild acceleration since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

There will be some in Government who will look at military cutbacks and think that lost effect can be replicated by bolstering EU military association. Our analysis is that this would be a critical mistake of the first order, akin to Belgification. By the same token, the Government’s policy of withdrawing British participation from the European Defence Agency is the right choice both strategically and financially. The report also endorses increased cooperation with the French and other governments on a bilateral basis.

Britain has a tradition of fighting in coalitions. When we did not, such as in the early 1780s, we did not flourish. It is an approach as self-evident as observing that it is as important to wisely pick the associates in your alliance. But if we continue along our recent path towards European military integration, we are in danger of allowing economies in the field to be badly safeguarded by false economies in policy thinking in Whitehall.

September 23, 2010

As the fallout continues over the conference remarks by Chairman Vince, readers’ attention may profitably be drawn to another speech that was made around the same time.

President Klaus of the Czech Republic has been over in North America, and his latest forthright presentation can be found here. It’s a valuable if brief essay both on recent economic crises, as well as on competing models of European and global trade and integration. The macroenomics argument is succinctly put – don’t blame problems in the markets, on the markets. Cowley Street scriptwriters should take heed.

Adam Smith again gets a mention, though this time (to follow on from a point by Dan Hannan), the context is more accurately set. So if you are after a discourse to digest, on this occasion I suggest you slip the Cable and steer towards the further shore.

September 07, 2010

If you have concerns over the way Short Money is handled, and if you have bunnies over the public funding of pan-EU political parties, look away now.

A new paper from the TaxPayers’ Alliance out today reviews a lesser-known angle: the extent to which Brussels has been funding the think tanks of political groups.

You might at a pinch be able to argue a case for it. I personally disagree, but in any event judging by the newspaper headlines over the years the released figures cover, the taxpayer has not been getting value for money. Given the state of the European economy and the fiasco over the EU Constitution, the think tanks tanked.

The really criminal part is yet to come, however. What is clear is that political movements favouring deeper European political integration have received the lion’s share of the £6.4 million at stake, by a factor of 10:1 over those critical of ever-closer union.

A council that funded ten players from Rovers and just the goalie from United would rightly be accused of bias (as well as waste). Surely that’s the case here?

August 18, 2010

A few days’
back, the
astonishing news broke that the European Parliament was spending a couple
of hundred thousand pounds on a computer simulation of life in EU politics.

The site is
now registering for testing. Fancy
wasting five minutes of an afternoon by organising a sit-in of the
Commissioner’s office? Inclined to lobby the designers so they can accommodate
a placard-wielding crowd, a rogue French farmer, or an anti-fraud investigation?
More seriously, what about test-suggesting a slot for alternative, Euro-sceptic
views on what the EU’s about amongst all the promo videos that are going to be
linked in?

The worse
that could happen is that you get a pixellated visit from Europol. I for
one intend to get my taxpayers’ worth. Given Paul van Buitenen’s celebrated discovery
of the high powered rifles and machine guns held by the Commission’s security
staff, it may yet turn into a version of Doom.

August 06, 2010

The
Business Secretary has
announced he intends to cut red tape and bureaucracy. Credit where credit
is due; this is acknowledging a very real problem, costing the country perhaps £30
billion a year. So it’s a start.

Part of the
BIS statement specifically addresses costs arising from EU legislation.
Specifically, we read,

Ministers will also be taking a rigorous approach to tackling
EU regulations and gold plating. The Government will engage earlier in the
Brussels policy process; take strong cross Government negotiating lines; and
work to end so-called ‘gold-plating’ of EU regulations so that when European
rules are transposed into UK law it is done without putting British business at
a competitive disadvantage to other European-based companies.

It is
frankly astonishing that ministers can think that the system has been running
to date without Government being engaged sufficiently early in the Brussels-law
making process.

But a word
of warning for the wise: we have been here before.

Roger
Freeman’s key brief in the John Major cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster was specifically to address the issue of business burdens in
legislation. That included trying to tackle EU costs; this was already acknowledged
as a massive contributor at the time, both in its own right and as a key
trigger for civil service gold plating. Everyone knew what was going on: there
was madness in the method.

Despite the
best of intentions, nothing came of Freeman’s efforts. Civil service
methodology was not reformed. The dog has gotten that little bit older, while
we are back to teaching the same trick.

The Government clearly has aspirations to get
to grips with the bureaumancy of law making. But will it - and more
pertinently, given the mechanics of Brussels, can it - succeed?

Short of
the skies parting and the earth splitting asunder, this was to be expected.
Proposals however heart-felt that called for the country’s withdrawal from the
EU would evidently never be adopted by the Government, and these were clearly
the dominant opinion coming across about Brussels.

Meanwhile, the country
is facing a financial crisis. Three budgets have been ring fenced – the NHS and
International Development by choice, and the EU by default. But the EU budget,
to which we are major net contributors, should share the
burden.

Our EU
proposal correspondingly took a practical tack. A not insignificant contributor
to our payments deficit was the 2008 Act, putting into force the Tony Blair
deal that gave up part of the Rebate in exchange for CAP reform. That reform
never appeared, so it’s time to rescind the Act and get our money back.

August 03, 2010

I find this a tremendous disappointment. Not on the grounds of the economic argument, since the costs are massive and the hub benefits overplayed. Nor because it deprives us of a regular op-ed in the Telegraph of world aviation sites that don’t lose mayoral luggage.

My reason is much more mundane. Given the Green obsessions of the present government, I was fascinated by how much above current sea level they were planning to build it.

July 29, 2010

Anne Milton has come in for some stick for suggesting that doctors should be able to use blunt language towards the hypermorphically-challenged. Her context was one of medical advice sought by a patient, rather than the state appearing in your living room to castigate you for a lifestyle choice, so I think her observation was in fact fair enough.

One of the more retrograde shifts over the past few years has been people increasingly being afraid of speaking their mind on sensitive subjects, simply because they are too self-conscious of how to express themselves. I exempt Yorkshire of course, and exclude David Cameron’s unfortunate recent forays into Peter Griffiths diplomacy.

What contrast, however, with the allegation on the front page of today’s Telegraph, to be explored in a documentary later tonight; "Mr Clegg decided weeks before the election that spending cuts were needed immediately, despite telling voters it would jeopardise economic recovery." We’ve heard the line since – political leaders simply didn’t know how bad the deficit was, or how bad the national debt was, or how much it will cost simply to service it. It was a surprise when they got into power. So the reason why the voter wasn’t told was because nobody could have known.

In reality, the scale of the deficit was merely one awkward subject the strategists had decided they would keep off-limits. It had been decided that the electorate didn’t have a right to debate, discuss, or choose. It now transpires the Liberal Democrat leader went further, and was advocating policy he himself always intended to overturn. And we wonder why people don’t trust politicians?

A doctor in his surgery bluntly informing Mr Supersize-me he needs to lose weight or he’ll die is just telling it straight. The same should have been said about the budget deficit, and an informed people should have been trusted to make the right choice. I’ll be tuned in tonight to see what else was planned but never said.

July 28, 2010

The news
that the Government are signing up to the likes of the European Investigation
Order is both astounding and increasingly predictable.

The
background to this pernicious proposal can be found in this
exceptionally useful paper. It is just weird that while politicians are now
so concerned about extraterritoriality and extradition in our relationship with
the States, ministers seem so ready to step away from a viable intergovernmental
alternative and handcuff themselves to such risk.

It’s all
the more the case when we consider that Britain, like Denmark, enjoys an opt
out – one that Copenhagen seemingly is sensibly ready to here enjoy. But
Britain is not. This draws me to one of two possible conclusions.

Either the
Home Secretary has been instructed to use the EIO as a bartering chit to keep
the Lib Dems happy. After all, it was LD policy up until a few weeks ago to greatly
accelerate UK participation in Justice and Home Affairs matters.

Or the
Secretary of State has already succumbed to the wiles of her department. We
have in the past explored how Britain has been signing up to a remarkable number of
JHA areas where the Danes have by contrast exercised their opt out rights. One
might have expected a Conservative Government would at the very least make the
most of its opt out to watch the flaws develop, and then demand they be fixed
before joining. After all, it took several years for the European Arrest
Warrant to include a tick-box, showing that an effort had been made to contact
the subject to tell him he’d been on trial.

Conservative support for Turkish accession to the Community is of course not new. The policy was famously supported by Margaret Thatcher in the days of Turgut Özal, and for many of the reasons cited elsewhere.

The reality remains that Germany has issues with demographics; France is still struggling with defining a European national identity; Greece remembers Smyrna; some Commission officials hum the tunes of Midnight Express, or of the Kurdish Relief Concert; while many diplomats in Brussels have wrapped themselves so closely with the ideals of Schengen and freestanding European Defence that they now shudder at the thought of a common border reaching out to the headwaters of the Euphrates.

But regardless of what the Conservative leader may say, the game has already moved on. The Lisbon Treaty included a section cleverly inserted by Giscard d’Estaing precisely to address the Turkey issue. As new Clause 7a spelled out,

1. The Union shall develop a special relationship with neighbouring countries, aiming to establish an area of prosperity and good neighbourliness, founded on the values of the Union and characterised by close and peaceful relations based on cooperation.

2. For the purposes of paragraph 1, the Union may conclude specific agreements with the countries concerned. These agreements may contain reciprocal rights and obligations as well as the possibility of undertaking activities jointly. Their implementation shall be the subject of periodic consultation.’

If I’ve pointed this out before, I do so again here as it still seems nobody in the Foreign Office has explored (in public at least) the consequences of this invention. By legerdemain, the French are already more than halfway to having achieved their diplomatic objective with the Bosphorus, while incidentally setting out a position that settles the EU’s future relationship with countries like the Ukraine, Israel, Tunisia - who knows maybe even further afield.

Turkey might see it as a loss, but if it allows Ankara to find the middle ground for trade and friendship short of the monstrous costs of full membership, then it’ll be the one smiling. And by taking a short step towards the EU, it will also show governments like that of the UK that there is another option to submitting to the stranglehold of full union.

Perhaps with Ankara moving closer to the Brussels, and London in time stepping away, we’ll meet in the middle. Turkey’s EU future has massive implications whatever happens. We may yet end up closer to Turkey than anyone in Whitehall can possibly imagine.

April 28, 2010

This week the political roadshow is motoring forwards on the economy. In this, it will be preceded by both the metaphorical and very real juggernaut of the national debt, though it’s far from certain if any of the candidates will become roadkill as a result.

But there is more at play than the capability of future governments to balance the books or simply to count straight.

Since first becoming involved in excavating the spending realities underlying the Bumper Books of Government Waste, I’ve kept half an eye on how some of the major themes emerging from that research have developed – and not just the strange material such as what happened to Berlusconi’s Downing Street gold. It was therefore a pleasant sight to find the Sunday Telegraph recently covering what forms, along with your standard red tape, a not insignificant cause of economic drag – the country’s steadily emerging compensation culture.

The Sunday Telegraph’s article focused purely on payouts to tourists visiting sites, but provides a very timely reminder of a problem that has expanded beyond reason or common sense. Of course it’s fair enough to indemnify cases where shoddy workmanship or downright negligence have caused injuries. But there comes a point where you cannot legislate for the inattentiveness and yes, stupidity of the individual.

To add to the nanny state we have been developing a nanny economy, driven not even by the civil courts themselves but by the very fear of them, shepherded by no-win no-fee ambulance chasing. This of course means higher prices for the consumer - someone has to pay the insurance companies - and higher costs to the taxpayer when councils, for instance, are concerned.

March 30, 2010

Cyril Northcote-Parkinson holds a special place of honour amongst essayists. Drop the first barrel of his surname, and despite the fifty years that have gone by since his popular writings first hit print, you are likely to recognise him as the author of a famed series of principles - or more accurately, satirical observations on human psychology. He was most famously the inventor of “Parkinson's Law”, which stated in simplified form that work expands to fill the time required for its completion; but his 1957 collection of essays (carrying a foreword by the Duke of Edinburgh, no less) set out the first batch of several more.

A key feature of his baseline philosophy is in stressing the inherent nature of bureaucracies to expand, since it is in the interest of the civil servant to demonstrate and justify his activity by increasing the number of his subordinates (as opposed to rivals) and the quantity of material produced. Although the resulting paperwork may involve genuine hard effort, it is internally focused, typically self-generating and entirely self-fulfilling.

A review of the Court of Auditors' 2008 reports on the annual accounts of EU institutions and bodies demonstrates this principle is flourishing in the European Union, with a vast leap in Euro-quango staff numbers. Astonishingly, totting together the accessible data, we discover that almost exactly 900 new jobs (899.5 to be precise, net) were created in the EU quangocracies over a single year. Let's put it into the context of starting figures. That means that EU agencies increased in manpower terms by around 23 per cent over the course of just twelve months.

This figure obviously excludes figures for the 'mother quango', the European Commission itself.

It appears that some of these jobs are contracted in, and therefore likely to be on consultancy-scale pay rates. Those on the other hand which are in-house can naturally be expected to come under EU staff regulations. Our paper on EU Diplomats explores some of the allowances on offer to this category of employee, bewildering and generous in their variety and scope.

November 10, 2009

Lee Rotherham is author of the newly-published Ten Years On – Britain without the European Union, which is available for free via this website
while stocks last. Set in 2020, the book documents a “history” of
Britain between 2010 and 2020 in which, under a Cameron Government,
Britain regains power from Brussels and enters a very different
relationship with the EU. Here is the fourth of several abridged extracts of the
book, still using imaginary characters, which shows . The third extract was published this morning.

Jim Thomson is rightly proud of his new thirty footer. Riding high in the dockside at Peterhead, the Annie is the newest addition to the Scottish inshore fishing fleet. Along with two other recently built vessels in the harbour, it symbolises the recovery of the industry today in 2020, after a period of forty years of decline.

Back in 1970, there had been 21,443 fishermen in the UK, with around one in seven of the workforce working part time. By the time of Britain’s EU renegotiations in 2010, there were just over 12,000.

Four in ten jobs at sea had been lost. But the pain was far more widespread, because for every sea-going job there were ten sustained on land maintaining the boats and processing what they caught. All told, accepting and implementing the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) had cost British coastal communities 115,000 jobs.

However, as Jim tells it, ‘As soon as we stopped being in the CFP, DEFRA immediately banned all dumping of fish at sea. That change had an immediate economic effect, because £130 million of fish that would otherwise have been dumped at sea now was landed. This was just the initial one-off bonanza, though. We brought a new system into play involving the ‘carry over’ of quota, negotiated at local community level. Where boats caught more than they were supposed to over the course of the season – and that was typically accidentally, as a result of fishing for other species – the catch would still be landed, weighed in order to add to the scientific understanding of the stocks, sold, and then reduced from the allowed catch limit for the following year.

Lee Rotherham is author of the newly-published Ten Years On – Britain without the European Union, which is available for free via this website
while stocks last. Set in 2020, the book documents a “history” of
Britain between 2010 and 2020 in which, under a Cameron Government,
Britain regains power from Brussels and enters a very different
relationship with the EU. Here is the third of several abridged extracts of the
book, still using imaginary characters, which shows . The second extract was published yesterday afternoon.

Part of the reason why Britain’s so successful today compared with the EU member countries boils down to a single word: accountability. Or, put it another way, democracy. These are abstract phrases and their true meaning and value can often be hard to appreciate. But Sheila Jones’s and Ashley Grayson’s MP understands them perfectly.

Graham Peal was first elected for the constituency back in 2010. He’s a former deputy head teacher. Not surprisingly, he got into politics first and foremost because of education issues, but he was also concerned about the dire state of the public finances. He tells us his views on membership of the EU have changed completely. ‘I remember, before I was interested in politics, watching the television news back in the early 1990s when the Maastricht debate was tearing politicians apart. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, I thought they were arguing just for the sake of it. Once I turned to my wife and vented my irritation, “Look at that bunch of nutters. They just haven’t got a clue about the real world.” At the time, I thought they were like kids in the playground scrapping over trading cards or something.’

Peal’s view shifted when he got elected, thanks to some first hand experience of what the EU meant in practical terms. ‘I suppose I’d scarcely been in for a month. First there was the euphoria of getting in, you know the adrenaline of this great change in your life, and then all the paperwork and chaos about getting the office up and running. But then the constituency case work started to kick in. That’s when reality struck.

November 09, 2009

Lee Rotherham is author of the newly-published Ten Years On – Britain without the European Union, which is available for free via this website
while stocks last. Set in 2020, the book documents a “history” of
Britain between 2010 and 2020 in which, under a Cameron Government,
Britain regains power from Brussels and enters a very different
relationship with the EU. Here is the second of several abridged extracts of the
book, in this case looking at how the countyr's workforce benefited. The first extract was published this morning.

Ashley Grayson is one of those whose been taken on at Gentle Breezes. He’s a school leaver who decided that university wasn’t for him.

Ashley is happy with his job and his prospects. ‘We’re doing well here, and I’m learning the skills to manage in business. And if I want to earn more, to buy something really special, you know, like a new TV for my Mum, or to meet a big bill, I can put in the overtime. When things go really crazy here, I don’t mind doing a whole weekend. It helps us keep on top of the job and this year Nikki, my girlfriend, who’s at college, and me went to Miami rather than Ibiza. Nikki says I wouldn’t just be able to do that if I lived in Strasbourg, say, or Milan. She says there you’re not allowed to do more than forty-eight hours a week and they’re even thinking of lowering that to forty-four. If you do, you – and your boss – are breaking the law and there’ll be plenty who’ll chase you for it. So no one wins.’

He tells us Nikki herself has her eyes on a year at Nantes improving her French. The programmes that allowed British and foreign students to spend time overseas didn’t come crashing to a halt in 2010, which was hardly surprising considering that so many exchange programmes took place with countries that weren’t in the EU anyway.

Talking to Ashley, it’s clear he knows and accepts that no one these days can expect to have a job for life. ’Our employment regulations aren’t the same as theirs are now,’ he says, ‘I’ve heard they put the emphasis on keeping jobs rather than building new ones. What that says to me is that when things get tough, in downturns, EU businesses – and especially small businesses, where most jobs are created – are far less able to adapt. They can’t just go onto short time or lay off people for a few months in order to cut costs and weather the storm.’

Lee Rotherham is author of the newly-published Ten Years On – Britain without the European Union, which is available for free via this website while stocks last. Set in 2020, the book documents a “history” of Britain between 2010 and 2020 in which, under a Cameron Government, Britain regains power from Brussels and enters a very different relationship with the EU. Here is the first of several abridged extracts of the book, in this case looking at how a business owner benefited.

Sheila Jones runs a successful small business in Birmingham, called Gentle Breezes. Over the past twelve months, it has expanded and taken on two new members of staff. As Sheila says, ‘hiring people is now a fairly straightforward process and I don’t have to spend hours explaining my reasons and decisions on various, complicated, forms.’

Like everyone else in the UK, Sheila knows the amount of red tape that choked British business in the past has been drastically cut. The process of review began within weeks of breaking with the old EU structures. It was no easy task; there were thousands upon thousands of statutory instruments, putting into law 105,000 pages of European regulations. These needed to be sifted to determine which ones made sense, which were superfluous and which went way beyond the original intent and were simply doing damage. A lot fell into the last category. The review quickly revealed just how many bad laws went far beyond the original EU intent because our own officialdom had enthusiastically added to the text for reasons of its own.

Tens of thousands of pages of regulations were either simplified or cut. Businesses were amongst the major winners. Sheila tells us, ‘I know for a fact that I do two hours fewer paperwork every week. Even the Health and Safety paperwork, it used to be my particular bugbear, is a lot clearer, and it now seems to be based on common sense.’ She also points out to us how the legislation governing waste disposal used to be simply self-defeating. ‘A small firm like ours was expected to cough up £850 in a given year to be compliant with just one directive, with a wall of paperwork that aimed to push waste to travel further. All that actually did was encourage our local fly tippers. You know, the worst thing was we just had to pass these compliance costs on to the consumer, never mind the extra £15 per tonne we had to pay to dispose of the waste.’

November 03, 2009

Brussels orbiters are having their moment of triumph. Recent vitriolic attacks on the Czech President by the Left and by continental integrationists have told us more about the commentators than the man himself. The Bohemians on both sides have proved their true worth.

There is perhaps an element of symmetry in the last redoubt against the EU Constitution centring on Prague Castle. During the Convention on the Future of Europe long years ago, when the text was first being carved, amongst the doughtiest of delegates defending the principles of the nation state were the ODS representatives, both in the main debate as well as in the youth convention.

Events have now moved on. The bastion behind the White Mountain has now fallen, and with it the Lisbon Treaty comes into effect.

Many Eurosceptics will be despondent. The enactment of Lisbon means that the renegotiation process, begun at Laeken in 2001, comes to a close and a new chapter opens up based on a new acquis. We cannot delude ourselves with the insane pretence that European integration has now reached its natural limit; nor even that we are now perched at the high water mark of the current tidal flow. The coming months, starting with the European Diplomatic service, will see the reinvigoration of the Brussels centralisers, whose one reticence – that of disconcerting an electorate – will now be removed.

September 09, 2009

Now that MEPs are starting to settle into the routines of Brussels and Strasbourg, no doubt their attention will presently be drifting to the issue of expenses.

In some cases the rules have recently changed. One example is the new set relating to language and computer courses for Members (2009/C 204/03).

One need not necessarily be a complete clog-wielding luddite about such matters (if one is permitted to mangle the wrecker metaphor). There is obvious merit in an MEP being more proficient in foreign languages, particularly core languages, not least in order to reduce the need for the prop of expensive interpretation – a subject explored with some horror by the European Court of Auditors in the past, and indeed recently referenced in the TaxPayers' Alliance comedy A-Z of Brussels.

Whether the taxpayer should pay for it, on the other hand, is open to question. You might have hoped that one of the credentials for which an MEP was selected in the first place was that he displayed some propensity for linguistical gymnastics. In that regard, the mellifluous tones of a Dan Hannan or a Charles Tannock already carried their erudition across to multiple audiences through a choir of tongues. The Lib Dems obviously have a good rep on this score thanks to their ex-Brussels Westminster frontbenchers.

Of concern, however, are the terms. Does an MEP need to be quite so computer literate at public expense, given his other generous office allowances in staff and gadgetry, or is this just an exercise in expanding a cv? Should the taxpayer be paying for an MEP to learn one of the more esoteric (no offence!) languages for reasons of simple intellectual curiosity? How will the system work authorising MEPs payment to learn non-EU languages, for instance where an MEP has known Russian oil links and an interest in that field after leaving Brussels? Why on earth is any MEP reasonably expected to be able spend up to €500 annually on teach-yourself books and tapes?

My main concern, though, is over the amount on offer. Each year, an MEP can spend €5,000 on language courses and another €1,500 on computer courses.

The going teaching rate, to judge by assistants provided by the Parliament itself, appears to be €40 per hour. By my fag-packet calculations, that works out at MEPs taking about half a day off every working week in Brussels or Strasbourg for self-improvement purposes.

An hour here or there you might agree with, but I would have thought constituents would have taken priority over a weekly half day of bookwormery and self-actualisation.

At least the Eurocrats got one thing right: the teacher or trainer has to have a professional qualification recognised by a member state. But, sadly, the loopholes expand elsewhere: if the courses take place abroad, the MEP is allowed to go on a week’s language blitz made up of half-day courses, and get both them and his air fare paid for, plus taxis from the airport for up to 40km distance. On top of all that, he gets half of his usual subsistence pay.

Far better to have just scrapped the allowance and required MEPs to take the in-house courses. I wonder why they didn’t.

Perhaps because someone clocked that it has the potential of a great new wheeze in the making for the less scrupulous set. But now that it’s been flagged up, will any of Britain’s MEPs now be found windsurfing away the winter afternoons of a language blitz in the Canaries?

September 28, 2008

Just a word to wish all of you reading this an enjoyable conference, as this will be the first I'll have missed for quite a while.

I imagine with all the firebrand oratory, battlebuses, armed sentries, oriental eateries, bustling stalls, reconstruction outings, snap-happy journalists and sniping from the shrubbery, I'll not be missing much in terms of scenary here in Afghanistan.

Then again, given all the beards and sandals, perhaps the Lib Dem conference would have been more of a home from home.

June 20, 2008

It's heart wrenching to see all those horrific accounts of atrocities being committed by the Tyrant of Harare, and to hear first hand from exiles of the horrors at work.

Mugabe has of course long been giving African despots a bad name. Why be surprised if he continues to employ Ceaucescu tactics on his own people?

From far off London it's impossible to truly grapple with the evil at play and the terrors being confronted. Any words from this safe and distant desk are ephemeral. But if they catch on a breeze and someone might take note, I whisper this; take heart. Don't give up. An election that is unfought, howsoever justified by the price in blood, is always taken by apologists as an endorsement to the incumbent. A stolen election never can be.